BookTalk
BookTalk
Book Talk
with Smiffs book & card store, Nerja
New or small paperback
editions of works by three Man
Booker Award winners – Hilary
Mantel (Wolf Hall etc.),
Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s
List etc.), and Ian McEwan
(Atonement etc.) – are the pick
of the crop in this month’s
Soltalk Hotlist.
time employment, loves
Miranda, a bright student living
with a terrible secret. When
Charlie comes into money, he
buys Adam, one of the first
batch of synthetic humans and,
with Miranda’s help, codesigns
Adam’s personality. This near-
perfect human is beautiful,
strong and clever, and a love
triangle soon forms. These
three beings will confront a
profound dilemma in a
provocative story warning of
the power to invent things
beyond our control.
Mantel’s magisterial historical
trilogy that launched with Wolf
Hall (2009), followed by Bring
Up The Bodies (2012),
concludes in The Mirror And
The Light (l). In this final
volume, the author traces the
last years of Thomas Cromwell,
the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power in
the court of King Henry VIII of England. She offers a defining
portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between
present and past, between royal will and a common man’s
vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict,
passion and courage.
So you moved to Spain decades
ago, set up a business, and now find yourself hoping, or even
expecting, that your children will also emigrate and take up the
reins of what you have created. This not-unfamiliar scenario is
the canvas on which Joanna Trollope paints her latest novel,
Mum & Dad (l). It has been 25 years since Gus and Monica left
the UK to start a new life in Spain building a vineyard and
wine business. When Gus
suffers a stroke, they appeal to
their children for help. But as
the children arrive, each has
their own idea of how best to
handle their parents, and the
family business. With
simmering resentments rising
to the surface, and tensions
reach breaking point, will
family ties be enough to keep
them together? After a quarter
of a century, can old wounds
heal?
The Mirror And The Light
leads off this month’s Soltalk
Hotlist of titles, some entirely
new, others moving into small
paperback format for the first
time or being reissued,
sometimes after years out of
print. All are due for
publication on dates in March,
with availability in print this
month or in early April. The
Hotlist helps readers to budget
for and plan book ordering.
In Keneally’s The Book of
Science & Antiquities (p), a
prehistoric man, Shade, lives
with his second wife and their
clan on a lakeshore. He knows that if danger threatens, the
Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to
save his people. More than
40,000 years later, Shade’s
remains are unearthed near the
now dry Lake Learned in New
South Wales, Australia. The
sensational discovery fascinates
a documentary film maker,
Shelby Apple, who tracks the
controversies it provokes about
who the continent’s first
inhabitants were, and where
Shade’s bones belong.
The Discomfort Of Evening (l),
a bestselling sensation in The
Netherlands, is now available in
English translation. Marieke
Rijneveld’s novel centres on Jas, who lives with her devout
farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter’s day, her
older brother joins an ice
skating trip. Annoyed at being
left alone, Jas makes a perverse
plea to God: and, the brother
never returns. As grief
overwhelms the farm, Jas falls
prey to increasingly disturbing
fantasies as she watches her
family crumble into a darkness
that could destroy them.
The Doll Factory (p), by
Elizabeth Macneal, is a
Victorian fiction about a young
woman who wants to be an
artist, and a man whose
obsession may destroy her
world. In London (UK) in 1850,
The story in Ian McEwan’s
latest work, Machines Like Me
(p), takes place in an alternative
1980s’ London. Charlie, drifting
through life and dodging full-
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